posted 03-09-2013 03:17 PM
TechCrunch reports that DIYROCKETS, a global space company co-founded by Darlene Damm and Diego Favarolo in 2012 to lower the cost of space exploration, and Sunglass, a cloud-based 3D design platform founded by Nintin Rao and Kaustuv DeBiswas in 2011, have announced a competition to see who can build the best open source rocket engines via 3D printing.

The goal of the contest is to prove that not only can well-funded private company projects like SpaceX contribute to extraterrestrial exploration, but so can anyone, with the help of open source, collaborative design and tools that make building rigorously engineered 3D tech affordable and accessible, regardless of budget or available PC hardware.

"The goal of DIYROCKETS is to lower the cost of building space technology through crowdsourcing and opensourcing," Damm said in an interview. "So this particular contest is tackling the challenge of transportation in the space industry, because it's one of the most expensive things. It's very costly to transfer things from earth up into space."